Archive

Ateliers publics / Public workshops

Winter 2013 Zine EDITING & PRODUCTION Sessions (January 10-22, 2013) The Zine is comprised of a series of nine color-coded booklets that each refer to a condition explored during the INFRACAMPUS project. The Zine was created in four evening sessions, each of a three-hour duration, by teams of participants who discussed, assembled and edited the contents of research material produced during the Fall 2011 workshops, Winter 2012 meetings and Spring 2012 studio.

Developed and coordinated by Jean Maxime Dufresne and Jean-François Prost

» A zine is most commonly a small circulation self-published work of original and/or appropriated texts and images usually reproduced via photocopier. It is a noncommercial, often homemade or online publication usually devoted to specialized and often unconventional subject matter. Zines are written in a variety of formats, from computer-printed text to comics to handwritten text. Small circulation zines are often not explicitly copyrighted and there is a strong belief among many zine creators that the material within should be freely distributed.

SYN- is looking for participants to take part in a inter-disciplinary workshop series that explores the culture and realities of university campuses, and reconsiders then as potential sites for experimentation. The call is open to all who would like to highlight, share and discuss a particular condition of Guelph University’s campus.

Drawing from previous explorations, SYN- intends to interact with Guelph’s campus and its surroundings to imagine a flexible framework where spatial tensions will be revealed in order to facilitate creative forms of appropriation. In these workshops we will explore how infra-qualities – such as undisclosed, lesser known or hidden realities – might inform us of future potentials for campus transformations: how could we then engage the campus as a locus for fostering new kinds of actions, social configurations and interrelations in common space ?

The research explores different topics such as: interactions between campus and urban life through insider and outsider perspectives ; re-shuffled notions of the historically «cultivated» North American campus and its idealized detachment; social dynamics and connectivity in a pavilion-based architectural setting altered by self initiatives and experiments; providing alternate uses or introducing creativity and participation processes in existing services like food production, on-site maintenance or security.

Workshop experiments and findings will establish the bases for a future collaborative intervention on the Guelph campus to be realized in 2012.

SYN-’s work was recently included in the Actions : what you can do with the city exhibition, presented by the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) from November 26, 2008 to April 19, 2009. « An exploration of how everyday human actions can animate and influence the perception and experience of contemporary cities. Seemingly common activities such as gardening, recycling, playing, and walking are pushed beyond their usual definition by the international architects, artists, and collectives featured in the exhibition. Their experimental interactions with the urban environment show the potential of a new level of participation by city residents. »

Exploring Urban Microclimates was presented by SYN- in early March 2009, as part of the CCA’s Actions Workshops series.